by R. L. King
“That’s all,” Trin said. “The way the portal’s designed, it needs an imprint to point it at the right place. It will be focused on your minds. The stronger all of you concentrate, the easier it will be.” Her gaze hardened. “That part’s all on you—I’ll be directing the ritual, so I can’t split my concentration. If you guys screw it up, and the portal ends up pointing at the wrong place, don’t blame me. Just keep your eyes open—you’ll know when to do it.”
“This better work,” the mob boss muttered.
“Just do your job and it will,” she said, glaring at him. “I need to go now, so you’re on your own.” She flashed a nasty grin at them, then disappeared out through the flap.
Several soldiers loitered around outside, doing a decent job of concealing the sidearms they carried. Trin motioned one over. “You have your orders, yes?”
The soldier, a hard-eyed man in a tight tank top, nodded. “Yeah. Got a group hanging out here keeping everybody away from the tent, and another big group spreading out to make sure the crowd doesn’t get too close to the ritual.”
Trin returned the nod. “Good. And they know to keep an eye out for Stone and his crew, right?”
“Yeah, we got it. If we see ’em, we’ll take ’em out.” He headed off to join his compatriots, and Trin continued on her way.
Aisha was finishing up with the dancers. As Trin approached, she called through the bullhorn, “Okay, everybody. You know what to do. Get into positions and let’s get out there and have some fun!”
The dancers cheered and moved off, spreading themselves out around the wide empty expanse between the gathered crowd and the towering form of the Man. Each of them carried a burning torch. In the darkness, the points of light bobbed around, tracing out a large and intricate circle as they all took up their positions.
“More showed up than I thought,” Aisha told Trin over the pounding beats of the dueling musical selections coming from various areas throughout the crowd. She descended the ladder. “I think they’re excited.”
“They’re excited about the ‘party’ afterward,” Trin said, contempt showing in her eyes as she watched them. “Too bad there won’t be one. Is everything ready?”
She nodded. “Better get going. The Man’s going up any minute now.”
And indeed, the thousands of people in the crowd seemed to sense that the moment they’d been waiting for was at hand. A cheer began to build, low at first and then rising to a crescendo as nearly every one of them screamed into the night sky.
“Here we go,” Trin said, and her smile was frightening.
Stone knelt next to the sobbing Pia Brandt, trying to get through what looked increasingly like a complete mental breakdown as all the things the woman had done and participated in caught up with her at once. “Dr. Brandt, please,” he said, his voice soft but urgent. “You have to help us. We need you. Please.”
“No…” she moaned. “No…just let me die. Let me kill myself. My daughter…Oh, God, Anna, my child…I just stood there and let them kill her…Oh, my God…” Her words shifted to muttered German as she wrapped her arms around her drawn-up knees and began to rock back and forth.
Stone put a gentle hand on her shoulder. “Dr. Brandt. I’m terribly sorry for your loss. We all are. I’m so sorry to have to do this to you now. But if you don’t help us, all the people here will die, and a lot more besides. We have to stop them. Pia—please. You remember me, from the Symposium? Remember, we spoke? Alastair Stone. We talked at the dinner, remember?”
Her reddened eyes, tears carving runnels through the dust on her face, came up to meet his for a second, then dropped again. “I—can’t—” Her voice was full of desperation. “Please—just leave me alone—”
“Five to nine, Doc,” Verity murmured. Behind Stone, she, Jason, and Sharra divided their attention between the scene in front of them and the crowd behind them, all gathered around to watch the Man burn.
Stone didn’t appear to have heard her. “Dr. Brandt—Pia—please. You must tell us what they’re planning. Please tell us.” He kept his voice gentle, leaning in close to her ear. “You can’t change what’s happened—none of us can. But you can save other people—other children—from this. We can stop it, Pia. We can. I promise we can. But you have to tell us—is it a portal, or some kind of summoning?”
That got through when nothing else had. “W-what?” She looked at Stone, confused.
“Which is it, Dr. Brandt? A portal, or a summoning?”
She took a deep hitching breath, glancing off toward the Man. “Both,” she whispered, and dissolved once more into sobs.
Brandt’s statement had an immediate effect on Stone. He stiffened, pulling back from the sobbing woman, his eyes going unfocused. “No…”
“What?” Verity demanded. “What did she mean, ‘both’?”
Stone didn’t answer. Instead, he leaned back in toward Brandt. “Dr. Brandt—I’m sorry, but I need to know the rest. Please, we don’t have much time.”
Brandt swallowed, shaking. She appeared to be trying to get herself together, but failing. “They—” She shook her head and looked down at the ground again.
A chill worked its way up Stone’s spine, and it had nothing to do with the cooling of the night air. Suddenly, with a clarity that was almost physically painful, he knew what the Evil were planning. “Dr. Brandt,” he said, spacing his words with great care. “Are they planning to summon a spirit to call the portal?”
She nodded wordlessly.
“Is there some sort of ritual involving dancers connected with it?”
Again, she nodded. She took a couple of breaths, coughed, and got out: “They—the spirit—I don’t know the ritual. It’s—Trin’s doing. The spirit—will help to bring the portal into being. The whole area—is a circle. It’s all set up. The Man—and the circle—connected…”
“Bloody hell…” Stone whispered. “And the dance?”
“To—help bring the spirit,” she sobbed. “And—sacrifices. Blood.” She began to cry again. “Oh, God, what have I done? What have I helped with?”
Stone closed his eyes for a moment, trying to process the sheer enormity of what the German researcher had just revealed.
“What’s going on?” Jason demanded. “What are they doing? What’d she mean by ‘sacrifices’?”
Stone scrubbed at his face with his hands, pushing them up into his hair as he let his breath out. “Bloody hell, they’re trying to do the same sort of thing Stefan tried. Only on a much, much larger scale.” His head snapped up. Without looking at his friends, he said in a monotone: “They’ve somehow made the whole playa into a ritual circle, including the Man. Right under our noses. They’re planning to summon some sort of enormous spirit to either help them bring the portal up or to bring it up itself. The dancers’ ritual will help bring the spirit, but it will want blood.”
“Oh, God,” Jason said from behind him. “Luna.”
Stone didn’t respond to that. He addressed Brandt again. “Dr. Brandt: this spirit. Once it calls up the portal, then what?”
She swallowed several times and swiped her hand across her face. “It—it will use its power, and the power from the circle, to sustain the portal until it’s drawing full power from the ley lines. The others will calibrate it.”
“The others?”
“The other—leaders. It will take its location from their minds.”
“Dr. Stone?”
Stone didn’t answer, continuing to stare at Brandt in horror.
“Dr. Stone? I think we need to get moving.” It was Verity, and her voice sounded urgent.
He turned to face her. “What? Why?”
She pointed. “Whatever they’re doing, I think it’s started.”
Stone, along with Jason and Sharra, turned to follow where she was pointing.
A cheer had begun in the crowd, once again rising to a shrieking crescendo as, far off in the center of the playa’s cleared-out area, someone lit the base of the towering wooden Man on
fire. The blaze roared up around the structure and consumed his feet, rising much more quickly than it should have. There was a vast whump! sound, followed by another cheer from the crowd that abruptly grew louder and more primal as a series of red beams like enormous lasers shot out twelve different points around the circle, each one terminating at points near the top of the Man. The crowd, thinking this was all part of the show, indicated their approval with wild yells and whoops, waving their glow sticks and torches high above their heads.
Only a small subset of those present, including Stone and his friends, saw what else was happening:
Some sort of vast, dark, vaguely humanoid thing, almost as tall as the fiery Man and the platform it stood on, had begun forming in the center of the playa.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Stone leaped to his feet, which was a mistake. He immediately swayed and would have fallen if Jason hadn’t grabbed him and propped him up. “I’m all right,” he snapped, shaking free of Jason’s grip. He hadn’t taken his eyes off the figure.
“What is that thing?” Verity demanded, eyes wide, staring up it. “Holy shit, it’s like fifty feet tall!”
“What’s it doing?” Jason yelled.
Stone wasn’t listening. “Come on,” he said. “We have to get over there.”
“Al, there’s forty thousand people between us and there,” Jason protested. “How are we gonna—”
“Verity—Sharra—grab him. There’s no time for subtlety now.” Stone took a couple of breaths, willing his weakened body to obey him. Frustration gripped him: for all his magical power, vastly augmented by the presence of the ley lines, he couldn’t do a damned thing about the fact that his body was exhausted from dealing with the effects of the drugs Trin had given him. He didn’t have time to be exhausted right now. “Go. Now.” He gripped Jason’s arm. “And keep your shields up.”
“What about Dr. Brandt?” Sharra asked, with a brief glance back at the sobbing researcher, who’d sunk back down into a little ball in the dust.
“She’ll either be all right or she won’t.” Stone realized how callous he must sound, but he didn’t have time to explain to the others just how dire the situation had gotten. Throughout the week he’d begun to doubt that the Evil could be planning a portal, mostly because the sheer amount of materials required to do so would have been nearly impossible to hide, especially since any kind of large standard portal would require days of setup. He had thought they were more inclined to construct a summoning circle to bring over a large quantity of Evil, which would have been bad enough but at least it would have been by its very nature finite. As any mage knew, summoning circles could only be maintained for a relatively brief amount of time, so even if the Evil were able to open the equivalent of a massive pipeline to their own home dimension, the number of their fellow spirits they could bring over would be limited by their ability to maintain the circle.
This, however, was the worst of both worlds. It hadn’t even occurred to Stone that the Evil might try a vast-scale version of what he and Stefan had been attempting to do back home: bring over an actual spirit to aid them—in this case, to open the portal for them, so they could then use the circle and the spirit’s own power to bolster it until it was self-sufficient, permanently fed by the gargantuan magical energy of the ten intersecting ley lines. With that kind of power supplying it, it would take nothing short of a nuclear blast to even have a chance of knocking it out, and even then it wasn’t a sure bet. If the Evil succeeded in sustaining this portal long enough for it to become permanent, there would be essentially no way to shut it down.
All these thoughts flew through his mind in a flash—his body might not be at its best, but there was nothing wrong with his mind. They continued running as he called, “Up and over!” and levitated both himself and Jason up above the heads of the seething, screaming crowd. Eyes fixed on the spirit, he sensed rather than saw Verity and Sharra doing the same thing, extending their own shields to cover Jason as well as themselves.
They didn’t even bother with disregarding spells or invisibility—they didn’t need to. As the spirit solidified into a dark, semi-translucent form that blotted out the light of the stars and the burning form of the Man, the crowd began to notice it. Their screams grew louder: they still, amazingly, thought this was all part of the show. The glowing red shafts of the lasers still radiated toward the top of the Man, spiking over the heads of the crowd. The music still played, and the dancers still danced—both the ritual group and all the other impromptu dances that had broken out among the crowd. Stone and his group might as well have been dressed in glowing suits and be flying patterns in the sky, and the majority of the crowd wouldn’t even have noticed them, let alone ripped their attention away from the spectacle of the Man long enough to look at them.
Some people did notice them, though. As they reached the inner part of the crowd and began to drop down, the loud cracks of gunshots cut harsh breaks into the ambient happy yells and cheers and rock music. Bullets spanged off their magical shields.
“They’re shooting at us!” Verity yelled.
“What the fuck?” Jason’s gaze was everywhere at once, trying to spot the shooters by the muzzle flashes. “Guns?”
“Not many of them are mages,” Stone said, dispassionately raising his hand and plugging one of the shooters with a spell. “You three will have to deal with them, I think. Stay together, and Jason, keep yourself inside Verity’s and Sharra’s shields. And be careful. I predict it will be very soon when the crowd realizes something’s wrong and turns into a mob.”
“Where are you going?” Jason demanded as the four of them touched down on the other side of the crowd.
“I need to stop that spirit,” he said grimly.
“Can you do that?” Verity asked, her eyes huge.
“No idea. But you lot can’t, so it’s to me.”
“What about the dancers?” Sharra asked. Two gun-toting Evil took a bead on them, and she took them down with a concussion beam from each hand. Some of the people closest to the front of the crowd seemed to have realized there were guns out, and several scuffles broke out as they panicked and tried to flee.
“Never mind them. Their part’s over now.” Stone glanced around, getting his bearings, then began to talk fast. “The other thing you need to do is take out as many of the leading Evil as you can. Verity, don’t evict them. Knock them out. As many as you can. Try not to kill them—if we can keep them in their bodies, we can take them out of the fight. Got it?”
Verity nodded, pale with fright. “What are we gonna do if the crowd stampedes?”
“Keep your shield up, and keep your wits about you.”
“They’ll probably run away from us if they freak out,” Jason said, looking grim. “They’ll be more danger to each other than to us.”
Another ragged cheer rose from the crowd.
“I have to go now,” Stone snapped. “Look. It’s summoning the portal.”
The rest of them looked where he pointed. Next to the spirit, a swirling vortex, almost as tall as it was, began to form in the air around the flame-clad Man. “Holy fuck,” Jason breathed. “That thing’s huge.”
“How long will it take it to become permanent?” Verity asked. More armed Evil approached; she and Sharra cut them down with casual ease, their ley line-augmented powers more than equal to the task. Bullets ricocheted off their shields from smarter assailants who were shooting from cover; a round hit a woman in the front of the crowd, and she screamed and went down.
“I don’t know.” Stone’s voice was tight with tension. He didn’t take his eyes off the growing portal. “Maybe fifteen minutes? It’s a guess—I’ve never seen anything like this before. Now go.”
Before they could stop him, he turned and moved off toward the towering spirit.
“Come on,” Jason said. “You heard Al—we’ve got to find those leaders. Can you guys find them magically?”
“I don’t think so,” Verity said. They were safe for the m
oment: most of the Evil soldiers seemed to have figured out that they were wasting their bullets trying to pierce the magic shields, so they’d fallen back. “Not unless any of them are mages, or they’ve got a lot of magical energy around them.”
“Maybe that chick Alastair was talking about is with them,” Sharra said.
Verity shifted to magical sight and looked around, but cringed back almost immediately as if she’d been struck. “No chance,” she said, wincing. “Don’t even try it, Shar. Between the spirit, the portal, and all the residual magic from that big honkin’ ritual, magical sight lights up like a strobe. No way we’re gonna pick ’em out.”
“Okay,” Jason said. “Let’s get moving, then. They’ve got to be around here somewhere. Maybe a bunch of those guys with guns are near them.” He looked first at Verity, then at Sharra. “How long are you guys gonna be able to hold those shields up?”
Verity shrugged. “No way to know, but I’m not feeling it at all yet. With the ley lines, probably quite a while.”
“If they’re supposed to be calibrating the portal with their brainwaves or something, they probably have to be close,” Sharra said. “Considering how many extra brainwaves there are around here.”
Jason scanned the crowd. The problem was, the empty area in the middle of the playa, with the Man at its center, was nearly a mile across from one side to the other, and people and tents lined most of it. The hysteria of the group nearest them didn’t appear to have reached the other side yet, but he and Verity and Sharra had no idea where the Evil’s leaders might have hidden themselves.
“Hey!” Verity said. “I have an idea. Come on, let’s move. We gotta find some more of those guys with guns.” She started forward.
Sharra followed, and after a couple of seconds so did Jason, so as not to get out of the protective aura of their shields. “Why?” he demanded.
“These guys remember what happened to ’em,” she said. “If I can evict one of them, we can ask him to tell us where the bosses are. If he doesn’t have an Evil inside anymore, he won’t have any reason not to tell us.”
